Quick Programming Note for Labor Day Weekend

After two exhausting days blogging, I need a vacation.  That isn't true.  But I do have a camping trip this weekend.  If I am not blogging next week, it isn't because I quit again- it is because I was eaten by a bear.  Remember me as a hero.


Incidentally, does anyone else get a strange feeling when seeing commercials for Labor Day sales with stars and stripes exploding in the background?  I don't mean this in the same vein as how degrading it is that MLK Day and Memorial Day are excuses for mattress sales- though there is an element in there.  I guess I mean it more because it evokes a celebration of capitalism, which is not exactly the reason for the holiday.  And while I think that the progressive labor movement was, in fact, a celebration of our ideals, the scorn with which the Flag-Pin crowd holds for the progressive movement makes for an uncomfortable association while watching the commercials (by Flag Pin I don't mean anyone who wears one, or of course any patriot, but those who use mile-wide and inch-deep patriotism as a political cudgel). 

Of course, I suppose you could see those commercials as unintentional subversion of the aggressively patriotic message, but it is pretty clear they are unreflective and opportunistic.  "This is a holiday, and Memorial Day is a holiday, and we use fireworks and flags and Ronald McDonald raising the flag at Iwo Jima to sell things- let's do it for this one!"   It seems a little obtuse to make this another chest-thumping holiday when one party is clamoring to further their program of deregulation.  I don't know why this is bugging me.  I've been reading some Upton Sinclair lately- for no reason other than I happened to see them on a shelf.   I'm not a socialist, really.  Just a guy who gets annoyed by things.